TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF PERSIAN LITERATURE (RESEARCHES ON PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE)
Year:2014 | Volume:49 | Issue:4 (20)|Papers Count:7

Correcting a valuable manuscript and annotating and glossing a book remained from the past not only reinforce the ethnic and national heritage of a country and provides extensive information about manner, thinking and intellectual and linguistic structure of past thinkers and scientists, but also is an original research which has been acknowledged by literary critics. The manuscript of Kashef al-Moshkelat by Baha al-Din Abubakr Ibn Kalnajar Shirazi has remained from seventh and eighth centuries (A.H) of which only one unique copy handwritten by the author is available. According to the text of this work and also acknowledged by the biographies written in his own time, the author of this book has had a prominent mystical and scientific status and composed this book in order to solve the difficulties of prevalent sciences in his own time and due to the request of his time’s learned men. This work, which has been written with a plain and vivid scientific language decorated with stylistic and rhetorical figures in the form of short sentences, consists of various chapters about interpretation of verses and hadiths, medicine, philosophical and religious difficulties, the author’s recommendations besides mystical expressions and the author’s revelations. This book has three major sections each of which has several subsections and each subsections includes various epistles totally consisted of 349 epistles.Providing some descriptions about the life of the author and investigating this book and its content, the article aims to explore the structure, style and linguistic characteristics of this book based on extracted evidence and also investigate it form aesthetic and literary aspects.

Beihaqi history is one of the masterpieces of Persian prose in which Abulfazl Beihaqi has provided a firm prose while describing an important part of Iran’s history. Investigation of this work shows that, in spite of its great literary-historical significance, it has been treated unkindly by both scribes and glossarists so that there is neither an authentic version of it for referencing nor a published version completely free from mistakes and problems. Although the sophisticated correction of Aliakbar Fayaz has ameliorated such unkind treatments a little and filled the present vacuum a lot, there is still a long way to an authentic and good version, and the names of many geographical places as well as some characters of this book are still unknown to us. Considering the intratextual and extratextual implications and studying a number of works such as Tabari history, Alfi history, Sistan history, Tajarob al-Umam, the collection of historical documents and sources, the comprehensive history of Islam and Iran, the news of Salajeqe Rum and the works of many poets like Onsori who has been the poet of Qaznavi court and is very important in this regard, the authors of this article have found out that, as opposed to the view of all commentators and glossarists of this work, the word “Xazra” does not mean grass and pasture but it means a kind of platform or anticum on top of which the king was watching something or performing a ritual.

Khaqani Shervani, entitled Afzal al-Din, is one of the pious poets of sixth century (A.H). The presence of scientific issues like medicine, astronomy, philosophy, theology, mysticism and religious thoughts in his poetry led to his being called “philosopher”. Religious beliefs and thoughts based on the Law are amongst the most important motifs of his poems which have been elaborated generally in the form of innovative and poetic images.The main axis of this article is the exploration of Ka’beh manifestation in his Divan with regard to critique of imagery; an issue which has not been considered in the past rhetorical books and simply the negative manifestation of religious concepts in literary works, named as neglecting the courtesy of Law, has been mentioned in the form of brief definitions and evidence but there is no detailed discussion about the Law, image and their mutual relationships.The issue of image, the Law and Ka’beh, the interaction of these three words and how they are used in Khaqani’s Divan constitutes the main axis of this article.This article shows that his attitude to Ka’beh and its manifestation, in spite of its high frequency in his poems, is not in line with the principles of Islamic beliefs and teachings, as much as is expected, and the poet has violated such principles and polluted his view with the love of the world panegyrically in many instances.

As a country which dominated many regions and peoples with different cultures and was always at the center of attention due to its deep influence on the changes of world history, Iran has had very strong links with its neighbors. Indeed, its status in the world history and its share in the history of human being can be recognized only through its contact and interactions with great neighboring powers. Among such cultures is the culture and civilization of China. In the pre-Islamic period, Iran had contacts with Chinese culture and civilization in various situations and via different ways and, from a certain period, Iranian ambassadors travelled to China regularly. Such extensive relations affected different aspects of Iranian culture and civilization and Persian poetry is the manifestation of such influences.Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is one of the important sources for understanding the relations between ancient Iran and China and the influences of such relations. In spite of such extensive cultural, economical and political relations between the two countries, Ferdowsi’s knowledge about China, its geographical situation and various aspects of its culture and civilization is incomplete. In fact, like his contemporaries and owners of information sources, he does not give us precise information. If Shahanmeh is divided into mythological and historical parts, it is hard to distinguish between China as an historical country and mythological region because he himself has seldom distinguished between Eastern Turkistan, China and Far East. For this reason, the present research aims to, first, identify the geographical status of China and Machin and, then, specify the similarities and differences between mythological and historical China in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Seyed Hasan Qaznavi is one of the great poets whose poetry and character have not been known very much due to living in one of the most fruitful periods of Persian poetry. His divan was first published with many problem in 1328 (A.H) by the correction of Muhammad Taqi Modares Razavi. These problems can be studied in the following fields: the method of correction (not specifying the basic copy and order of using other copies, not specifying the source of verses and poems, the defect of copies); variant copies (mentioning the variant copies without the sign (/) of copy, incomplete variant copies, preference of annotation over the text, sameness of annotation and text); incorrect forms; omissions (poems and verses); general problems (repetition of poems and verses, print errors, not having appendices and defection in end indices and using sources with unscientific publishing). Besides some points such as determining and explaining the specific method of correction and providing complete variant copies by considering trustworthiness which is one of the primary and obvious principles of scientific correction and should be regarded in the critical correction of this Divan, nowadays some authentic copies of this Divan have been obtained which eliminate many mistakes, Tashifs and omissions of Modares’ printed version. Proposing various instances of such mistakes and defections, this research emphasizes the necessity of recorrection of Seyed Hasan Qaznavi’s Divan.

The manner of using language in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, like the works of other great figures of Persian literature, is a creative and unique one. An instance of such creativity is revealed I using the word “Soxan”. Without being bounded in the common usages of this word in his time, Ferdowsi has found out its special capacity and conferred some great interpretive capacity to it in his artistic book of verse.Using descriptive-analytical method, this research aims to propose thirty six readings of this word in order to show such characteristic of Ferdowsi’s poetry and draw the attention of readers to the conceptual scope of one of the words of Iranian national epic and its capacities.Foregrounding the status of this word in the linguistic structure of this work which paves the way for the interpretability of the text and also representing his personal style in using such word which asks the reader to decode its meaning and interprets it himself are other aims of this research which is unprecedented among researches about Shahnameh.

Difficulty and strangeness are the adjectives which have been ascribed to Khaqani’s Daivan for a long time. A notable part of such difficulties originates from the extensive cultural background on which the poet has based different themes, images and novel expressions. His strange manner in poetry is so that, for staying away from widely-used expressions, he has linked various kinds of knowledge with his poetic competence and created valuable and high poetry. His outstanding talent in using language and the delicacy he showed in using such kinds of knowledge all cause his words not to be strictly scientific and non-literary. Medical statements are one part of his cultural background used by the poet prominently in composing his poems. Due to the presence of great physicians such as Zakariaye Razi, Majusi Ahwazi, Abu Ali Sina, Ismail Jurjani etc. medicine developed a lot in his time. Moreover, the literary milieu of his time required our poet to be a knowledgeable person, especially due to the presence of prominent rivals such as Abul’ala Ganjavi and others. This article aims to investigate animal drugs as a part of such medical knowledge.